Xbox's Bethesda layoffs include the artist responsible for designing Skyrim's khajiit and argonians, who had been at the company for 27 years

If you've ever liked the character designs of an Elder Scrolls game, chances are you've met with some of Christiane Meister's work—as a senior character artist, Meister's been with the company for 27 years (which is only four years fewer than I, the person writing this, have been alive). She's worked on every game from Morrowind to Skyrim, and she was caught in the wave of Xbox's first round of layoffs this week.

The news came to my attention via Lady Nerevar's post on Bluesky, though I double-checked Meister's LinkedIn and, surely enough, she is currently looking for work: "I was in charge of design, creation, and management of character art assets throughout all of the Elder Scrolls projects, starting with Morrowind to our latest title, Skyrim.

"This included drawing concepts and seeing the art piece through to the final stage of getting the object in the game as well as handing off concepts to other artists in the character group. I also oversaw outsourced assets from design to final in-game models."

As for her role in Skyrim, Bethesda still (bitterly) has a 'meet the artist' blog from 2022, wherein Meister talks a little bit about how she gave the khajiit and argonians a facelift between Oblivion and Skyrim:

Details

"The beast races have always been a challenge, technically. In Oblivion, we went the route of everyone having the same face and using FaceGen to morph that face into the beast races. That was a… look. In Skyrim, I just [made] the faces how I wanted and then provided them with their own facial features to change. This looked much better! The only thing that it required was that we make separate helmets to fit their heads."

To me, it speaks to the depths of Xbox's cuts that such an incredibly crucial part of The Elder Scroll's visual identity has been let go. As some have pointed out, Asha Sharma, the current CEO of Xbox (who bravely claimed she'd steer the company towards an improbable 1 billion daily players), would have been either nine or 10 years old when Meister started working at Bethesda for the first time.

If you were to be a ruthless capitalist about it, you could argue that long tenures in game development lead to higher salaries—which'll often be the first in the crosshairs when layoffs inevitably come calling. The 'if' there is important, though, as I cannot think of a single situation in which booting someone with this much experience and expertise is the right move.

It's no wonder the industry writ large is spooked. There's no real world in which any of these layoffs and studio closures are a sign of good health—especially given the industry isn't exactly poor, right now. Global games revenue surpassed $200 billion in 2025; the money is there, it just seems to belong to the shareholders, and not the people who've been making games for nearly three decades.